This is a dual reply to both Librarian in Black and Library Garden. Both question how professionals can still seem to hold on to old practices in the face of “Library 2.0″ to hold an “unwillingness to take on anything new“.
A quote from Library Garden:
But how did we get to this stage? Why do we have professional librarians who refuse to keep up with the professional and technological requirements? How did we reach a point where the patrons’ needs were less important than the traditional way of doing things?
All along, the job of a reference librarian has been to find the information patrons need. We are in the business of connecting people to the information they require… so why care about the format that information is found in?
My reply brings up a lot of issues I have been realizing about Library 2.0 and librarianship in general.
Of course we should always keep up with the times. Librarians have always been seen as the avant-garde of information technology (even beginning with the codex).
I think the real danger is to see technology as the complete solution. Patrons not coming to the library: must be because there is no Flickr group. Reference service stats down: must be because IM reference is so horrible, or non existent. Teenagers choosing Google over books: we need a Second Life presence.
There is a problem in society and culture right now where people choose cheap and easy information satisfactions over long, difficult but ultimately more enriching ones. True, we should use technology to fulfil the later, but it is not going to do the work for us, nor solve all of our problems.
Sometimes people just can’t have it cheap and easy. And the library has to keep promoting the hard and rewarding path and instruct (gasp!) patrons as to why that path is rewarding.
I encourage you to read the posts you are responding to closer before replying to them. Neither of us questioned how libraries could hold on to old practices. We question how librarians, professionals, can refuse to become educated about new technologies, new resources, new ways of connecting our users with information–claiming that it is not important to our work or that it’s “just a fad” — a ridiculous claim for things like IM that have been around for well over a decade. In addition, neither of us in any way implied that technology was the solution or reason for any library failure. Talk about your own ideas, please–that’s what the web is all about. But but please don’t misquote or attribute false conclusions to my work.
I don’t think I attributed any conclusions to your work at all. All I said was that it raised questions I had been thinking about. I neither agreed nor disagreed with anything you had to say. And I did not misquote you, because I did not quote.
Thank you for allowing me to springboard some ideas off your thoughts.
You wrote: “Both question how professionals can still seem to hold on to old practices in the face of “Library 2.0″.” That’s not what I said or implied in my post, nor was it in the Library Garden post. That is what I’m referring to.
“unwillingness to take on anything new”
This is from your post. Whether I drew too strong of a conclusion from this line is a matter of interpretation.
However, I have edited the line you have cited and replaced it with the line above. It doesn’t change my thoughts, and I hope that is satisfactory to you.
Thank you Steve. And of course I would never want you to change your thoughts on the subject. In fact, I agree with much of what you’re saying. I just don’t think anyone I know who promotes tech knowledge for librarians who also thinks that tech is the answer to any problem, or that traditional library skills should be tossed out the window.